Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-12-16-Speech-2-489"
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"en.20081216.44.2-489"2
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"Mrs Ayala Sender, I would like to begin by congratulating you for making one of the most tragic social problems our common political priority. Nowadays, the loss of human life, as you said Commissioner, is far above the figure we want to see at a general European level.
We have almost 70 standards for various spare parts for cars, but at the moment, we do not have a directive to curb the number of people losing their lives on the European Union’s roads. This is absurd. The safety of human lives on our roads is no less important than the environmental standards which we impose on Member States. In this context, we need to support, in tomorrow morning’s vote, Mrs Sender’s report proposing mandatory cross-border sanctions for four main offences which account for more than 75% of fatalities on the road.
Implementing cross-border measures against these offences will limit the number of serious and fatal accidents and will bring us closer to a reduction target of 50% by 2010. General road policy is based on the European Union’s general road legislation and on general standards, but not necessarily using the same benchmarks. We are talking about red traffic lights and speeding, but we are not talking about the operation of traffic lights or roundabouts, or about not using mobile phones and smoking when driving, or about driving courses in the European Union or general fines which would have shocked even the most hardened offenders.
If, at the moment, a Hungarian driver is allowed to break the highway code in Germany and is not punished in any way for this, introducing this directive and your proposals will ensure that he will be punished in his own country. The European Union needs a general European policy on road safety that will establish a safety level sufficient to protect human lives on our roads, which Member States are not allowed to deviate from.
We can rely, of course, on the Commission to punish governments which have not dealt properly with waste, which have failed to observe the Working Time Directive or which have harmed the environment. Do we not need then mechanisms which will guarantee that national road death figures do not exceed any average European values?
In this context, I would once again like to emphasise how important it is that we adopt generally accepted European accident indicators as our yardstick. I believe, Mrs Ayala Sender, that your report makes progress towards creating an integrated pan-European road safety policy. This directive will provide the basis for a Europe without road offences, without borders and without any chance of breaking the rules."@en1
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